Faced with Charlotte Gainsbourg's second grown-up album, one's impulse is to scrutinise it for clues to her personality. Initially, though, she seems curiously distanced, as if acting the role of a singer in a film. She shares the credit for just one song; primarily, the scattershot sounds and surrealistic lyrics are typical of her songwriter and producer, Beck, who renders his muse more mysterious by burying her gossamer voice comparatively low in the mix. Slowly, though, glimpses of what has driven Gainsbourg to make IRM emerge. They are in the dispassionate title track, which explores what it is to have your brain scanned (in 2007 she almost died from a cerebral haemorrhage); in her unexpectedly assured cover of Canadian singer Jean-Pierre Ferland's piquant contemplation of death, Le Chat du Café des Artistes; in the nouvelle-vague sensibility of Heaven Can Wait. Most of all, they're in the fragmentary echoes of her father's music: songs she may never surpass, but gracefully, admirably, strives to live up to.